OTHER VOICES.

Hostess, Shmostess

Is The Praise For Putting On A Party Worth The Price?

January 21, 1996|By Joan Frank. Special to the Tribune. and Joan Frank is the author of "Desperate Women Need to Talk to You."

So I did the office holiday party this year. Me.

Thirty people, their mates and families. All by myself. Presents, catering, rentals, deposits, specialty gift-wrapping, last-minute dashes for candy, wine-bags, nametags. I hauled boxes, assembled props. I found and wrapped gifts, made a grab bag of goodies for employees' kids, organized by age. I played Vanna White to the boss' Santa, distributing company presents, while keeping an eye on the flow and quality of food and drink. Did I mention overseeing our white elephant exchange? Times 30, remember.

Somehow it worked. By the end of the evening people were drifting away with sated smiles. A few approached to thank me as they left. One guy gave me a brotherly hug. Another declared the company's employees felt better about each other this holiday than they had in any previous year, as a result of this party. And at evening's end, with everyone else gone as we piled into separate cars for home, the boss, whom I really admire, kissed me in gratitude, as did his girlfriend.

Yet as I steered onto the highway for home, I felt like weeping. Not just because of physical exhaustion, or for the fact that there had been no time to get anything to eat or that my own personal errands had been forced to take backseat to this office affair.

I felt bereft because I hadn't been able to participate in the damn thing.

I couldn't hang with my hood. I had to buzz and mill around like a general monitoring his troops' flanks, nudging along the momentum, calling for attention, announcing rituals and games and presentations, signaling for drinks, greeting late arrivals, kissing their babies.

Believe me, I love kissing babies. But I could not stick around to have a good talk with their mothers and fathers, or with any of the colleagues I have been hankering to get to know a bit better.

To be coarse about it, I got a big bellyful of hostessing, and like the little boy pointing out his emperor's unclothed state, I am here to report that it sucks.

When I arrived home, my boyfriend and his best friend were waiting for me with a welcome glass of wine and some dinner. As I collapsed, I struggled to explain to them how I felt: not just tired, but as if I had actually failed in some way. Despite all the praise and thanks I felt as if I had missed something big and important which I couldn't even properly name. Then it came to me.

I missed the party.

I had administered it, facilitated it, as they say in psychobabble. But I hadn't attended it.

That was when our friend Kevin, a longtime bachelor, suggested that this was why people got married.

I missed his logic. Say again?

Giving parties and dinners always carries the dismaying occupational hazard of missing the true pleasure of the actual gathering, he explained. People marry, he said, so that one person can cook and toss and pour and tidy and simmer and set the table and fuss and get sweaty and greasy and clear and serve and prepare, in the thousand and one ways people need to prepare when they host an event.

The other partner can talk to people.

What luxury! She or he can listen and respond. Can revel in the leisure and purity and elegance of contemplating nothing except conversation and food. This lucky individual can give guests full, clear attention instead of that sort of vague, glassy-eyed "uh-huh" guests hear as the cook/host frantically tears lettuce or metes out silverware and napkins or keeps sticking her head in cupboards and freezers, hoisting and proffering.

This was a not-unreasonable theory, I thought sadly, but it did not solve my exhaustion, or worse, my loneliness. Yet painful as this felt, I could not see rushing to marry having much to do with office functions.

I do see Kev's essential point, however, and that point is simple, and vital to women who take on too much: Get help. Delegate. Spread the chores around.

Next year I plan to recruit early. What'll I promise in return? Great admiration. A sense of contribution. Martha Stewart must have minions; by heaven, so will I. And as to marrying -- well, that's a separate consideration. I want to be motivated by slightly more than coolly efficient PR -- though more and more I suspect that's most of the ballgame.